I might have liked the Showtime movie "Dirty Pictures" better if I hadn't just caught James Woods on Cinemax last weekend, as the cynical vampire slayer in "John Carpenter's Vampires."

Now that was Woods -- wound tight for imminent violence and flashing moviedom's gnarliest killer sneer.

In "Dirty Pictures," he's Cincinnati gallery director Dennis Barrie, who was indicted and tried for showing the late Robert Mapplethorpe's controversial photographs in 1990.

Woods as the director of an art gallery? Nah. I kept waiting for him to drive a stake through the Cincinnati prosecutor's heart. It wasn't going to happen, even if there is a cutthroat side to the art world.

Despite its earthy title, "Dirty Pictures" really hovers around a cerebral exercise, in which First Amendment rights bump against public outrage in the gray realm of law.

Barrie, the director of the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, was charged with obscenity because of a Mapplethorpe exhibition that included photos of ho mosexual sadomasochism and nude photos of children.

The case ignited a national debate over the public funding of allegedly obscene art. It's a debate that will always be with us; witness the political furor last year over the "Sensations" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

"Dirty Pictures" labors to apply a semigloss coat of -- dramatic entertainment to a thorny social issue, with Diana Scarwid as Barrie's wife, Dianne -- they've since divorced -- and Craig T. Nelson as the sheriff who instigated the legal charges.

But the best efforts of veteran director Frank Pierson and screenwriter Ilene Chaiken can't turn the trick. The Barries are hounded at home and shunned in public. There's a murky offer of a bribe to stop Barrie from testifying. Dennis and Dianne Barrie quarrel, loudly.

It's all to make "Dirty Pictures" viewer-friendly, in its way. We may not know much about art, or First Amendment niceties, but who can't relate to a family in turmoil? Problem is, there's a de rigueur movie feel to it. Real or not, these story points pull our chain too obviously.

The tilt of the commentaries, the movie around them and, for that matter, the jury is toward unfettered artistic expression. But Buckley is always an interesting counterweight.

"If you have a bullwhip going into the man's anus, it might be exquisitely executed," Buckley says in one of his commentaries. "The question is, is it a necessary obligation to that artist to display that piece of art? I think it is not."

By the way, Showtime prefaces the movie with a warning. The Mapplethorpe photographs that landed Barrie in court are on display in the movie. So if you don't want to see them, there's always plenty else to do on Saturday night.

It's a dicey comparison, but a superb PBS documentary on Sunday night also involves the artistic depiction of disturbing subject matter.

This time, it's war. "They Drew Fire: Combat Artists of WWII" looks at a neglected sidelight of the big war -- artists who went into combat and produced more than 12,000 paintings and drawings.

Most were recruited by the various branches of the military. Others were sent by Life magazine and by Abbott Laboratories, which wanted depictions of the medical corps in action.

Their work was shipped home during the war to be mass-reproduced; much of it ended up hanging in drug store windows. But after the war, it was withdrawn from public view. Most of the originals are now warehoused and virtually forgotten.

Army artist Edward Reep reads an old letter giving him his marching orders: "Express if you can, realistically or symbolically, the essence and spirit of war. You may be guided by Blake's mysticism, by Daumier's humanity and tenderness, or better still follow your own inevitable star."

I don't see much Blake in the artists' works; they seem simply to have followed the troops and painted what they saw plainly. What they saw was frequently inhumane, but also often surprisingly tender.

Several artists say they sought a quiet place to work, after the heat of battle. After all, says Marines artist Richard Gibney, "You can't say, 'Hold the war, I'm drawing you.' "

The art is eye-opening and usually candid. But one of the best things about the documentary is that the artists' eye for detail carries over into their verbal descriptions of combat.

When Gibney recalls climbing down a rope ladder from a ship's deck to a landing craft, viewers can feel the sensations -- the pack straps cutting into shoulders, rifles banging against the body, the waves sweeping the waiting landing craft up and down 10 feet at a time, the sensations of fear and anticipation.

Six o'clock on a Sunday isn't the most convenient local air time, but catch "They Drew Fire" if you can. Here, surely, is an art exhibition that begs for a public venue, without that pesky prospect of jail time. ..